October 31, 2011

MICHAEL SHANNON: Talking Zod with EW

Entertainment Weekly has an interview with actor Michael Shannon in which he discusses the second season of his HBO series Boardwalk Empire. However, during the course of that interview the conversation turns to Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and Shannon's portrayal of the Kryptonian Zod. What follows is an excerpt from that interview.ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:Were you a fan of the Superman comics, or Terence Stamp’s Zod in Superman II? MICHAEL SHANNON:I don’t read the comic book, although when I got the job, they sent me a giant DC Comics book that weighs about a ton. It’s got the whole history of DC in it. It’s fascinating, actually. I looked at it with my daughter. She’s really fascinated by it. I remember Terence Stamp doing it. He was phenomenal. I have to try and figure out a way to do something different.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:So you’re not saying “Kneel before Zod” while wearing parachute pants? MICHAEL SHANNON:[Laughs] Yeah, the flowy costumes don’t really…that’s not the style nowadays. Everything’s skintight. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you have a costume? A Krypton outfit? MICHAEL SHANNON:There’s two different modes. There’s something that I have to wear a motion-capture suit for, because if I actually wore it, I wouldn’t be able to move. It’s a very big…thing. I actually don’t know what it’s going to look like, I just know that it’s very cumbersome. There’s another thing that I wear that’s an actual costume. It’s pretty simple. There’s no paisley or anything. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:You don’t get to wear a flowing cape or anything like that? MICHAEL SHANNON:I don’t know. That’s the thing about these movies. I could have an elephant head. That would certainly be a new interpretation of the character. Like Ganesh, right? Isn’t that the god that has the elephant head?